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Ignore or Keep in Git

We can control what to be stored or not to be in Git remote repositories.

devops, integration
Posted
6 min read
<a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/a-close-up-of-a-computer-screen-with-a-bunch-of-words-on-it-EUzk9BIEq6M">Unsplash Gabriel Heinzer</a>
Unsplash / Gabriel Heinzer
Ignore or Keep in Git

We can control what files or directories to be stored or not to be stored in Git remote repositories.

They are .gitignore and .gitkeep.

.gitignore

There are many unnecessary files that we don’t want to store in Git for example, .venv/ in Python projects, node_modules/ in Node.js projects, or .terraform in Terraform projects. Or some data files or even a credential files in the project directory that we need to keep them in only our local machine and not in remote repositories.

.gitignore is a file that Git uses to check and ignore them. It could be an exact file name or directory or a pattern.

Example

Let’s say we have a project structure like this:

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.
├── normal-file2.txt
├── normal-file3.txt
├── normal-folder
│   └── normal-file1.txt
└── secret-folder
    ├── confidential.txt
    ├── public.txt
    └── super-secret-file.txt

3 directories, 6 files

Ignore by a file name

We can directly put the name of files. It can be just file names to ignore them in any directories, or an absolute path in case we need to store the same name in other directories.

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    .
├── normal-file2.txt
├── normal-file3.txt
├── normal-folder
│   └── normal-file1.txt
└── secret-folder
    ├── confidential.txt
    ├── public.txt
    └── super-secret-file.txt

3 directories, 6 files

  • We ignore 2 secret files under secret-folder/ so they won’t take place in the commit.

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    secret-folder/super-secret-file.txt
secret-folder/confidential.txt

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    $ git status -u 

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        .gitignore
        normal-file2.txt
        normal-file3.txt
        normal-folder/normal-file1.txt
        secret-folder/public.txt

Ignore by a directory name

We can also put the directory name to ignore every files inside. It could end with a slash (/) or not, either way works.

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    .
├── normal-file2.txt
├── normal-file3.txt
├── normal-folder
│   └── normal-file1.txt
└── secret-folder
    ├── confidential.txt
    ├── public.txt
    └── super-secret-file.txt

3 directories, 6 files

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    secret-folder # or secret-folder/

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    $ git status -u 

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        .gitignore
        normal-file2.txt
        normal-file3.txt
        normal-folder/normal-file1.txt

Ignore by patterns

We can also ignore files with glob patterns.

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    .
├── normal-file2.txt
├── normal-file3.txt
├── normal-folder
│   └── normal-file1.txt
└── secret-folder
    ├── confidential.txt
    ├── public.txt
    └── super-secret-file.txt

3 directories, 6 files

  • This will ignore every files in every directories where the file name starts with any characters (*), followed by -file, followed by any characters (*), and ends with .txt.

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    *-file*.txt  # or **/*-file*.txt

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    $ git status -u 

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        .gitignore
        secret-folder/confidential.txt
        secret-folder/public.txt

Ignore but include a specific one

After we ignore some directories but just realize that we still need some files inside. We can use ! like this.

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    .
├── normal-file2.txt
├── normal-file3.txt
├── normal-folder
│   └── normal-file1.txt
└── secret-folder
    ├── confidential.txt
    ├── public.txt
    └── super-secret-file.txt

3 directories, 6 files

  • First we ignore every files inside the directory by directory/* to claim the file level, not directory level. Then add files we want to include by having ! in front. Now we can see that file is going to be committed.

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    secret-folder/*
!secret-folder/public.txt

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    $ git status -u 

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        .gitignore
        normal-file2.txt
        normal-file3.txt
        normal-folder/normal-file1.txt
        secret-folder/public.txt

Personal .gitignore

We can maintain the ignore file at .git/info/exclude. This file works like .gitignore but it won’t be recognized by Git so it won’t be store in the remote repository.

The benefit from this is that we can make new files in our local repository and will be ignored to Git without changing .gitignore so that it won’t affect our teammates’ working environments.

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    .
├── normal-file2.txt
├── normal-file3.txt
├── normal-folder
│   └── normal-file1.txt
└── secret-folder
    ├── confidential.txt
    ├── public.txt
    └── super-secret-file.txt

3 directories, 6 files

  • Here we just ignore only the directory secret-folder/.

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    secret-folder/

  • But in here we also want to ignore normal-file2.txt as well.

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    # git ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude
# Lines that start with '#' are comments.
# For a project mostly in C, the following would be a good set of
# exclude patterns (uncomment them if you want to use them):
# *.[oa]
# *~

normal-file2.txt

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    $ git status -u

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        .gitignore
        normal-file3.txt
        normal-folder/normal-file1.txt

Easy creation

There are so many ways to create .gitignore file for instances:

  1. Create it manually and write the contents like above depends on our works.
  2. Copy contents from github/gitignore.
  3. Generate it from gitignore.io.
  4. Build automatically with package managers such as uv.
  5. Choose from templates when create a new repository in Git servers such as Github.

and more.

.gitkeep

Git basically doesn’t include empty directories. For example, if I have

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.
├── published
│   └── sample.txt
└── drafts

Then I can’t commit the directory drafts/ because it is empty.

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$ git status -u

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        published/sample.txt

So I just create an empty file named .gitkeep inside drafts/ to make Git recognize it.

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.
├── published
│   └── sample.txt
└── drafts
    └── .gitkeep      # <-- newly created

Then the directory drafts/ can be committed there.

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$ git status -u

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        published/sample.txt
        drafts/.gitkeep

However, .gitkeep is not one of special files at all. In fact, we can create any name to the file because we just want the directory to be not empty and Git can recognize. And the name .gitkeep is just a convention name to see that the file is keeping the directory in Git.

References

devops, integration
git gitignore gitkeep
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.